They hauled Enid to her feet, side-on to my gaze. Her lips were split and blood dripped from her nose. Seneca drew his sword and cut the clothes from her fastidiously while Caius struggled futilely against the men who held him. When she was naked, Seneca looked her up and down, his features twisted in disgust. Her beauty was magnificent, but it held no allure for him.
"Look at this!" Enid's breasts, heavy with suck, were oozing milk around the nipples. He prodded one of them with the point of his sword, drawing blood, and turned towards his friend who still leaned against the wall. "A cow," he said. "A great, ungainly, unhygienic cow! Ugh!" He shivered with loathing and Enid spat on him. He turned back to her and punched her brutally in the stomach, and she grunted with pain and would have collapsed had she not been held.
"Whoreson," I thought. "For that alone, you'll die." "Get the bitch out of here. She defiles my sight!" As the two men began to turn her around, I leaned backwards and looked across at Plautus, who nodded, holding up two fingers. We pressed our backs to the wall and waited. Enid was a big girl and she fought hard, in spite of the pain she was in. It took long moments for them to wrestle her to the doors. I heard Seneca say, "Close those doors behind them," and I hoped Plautus had heard it too and would wait. They came through the doors, both men giving their full strength and attention to controlling Enid, who was struggling like a demented thing. As they left the room, somebody pulled the doors closed behind them. Plautus and I both sprang at the same time and the two men died before they even knew they had been taken. They died quietly, too, but before we could lower their bodies to the floor, Enid fell heavily, and the two men who had gone to search for me came back into the atrium. There was no point in silence now. We dropped both corpses with a clatter and a voice inside the room said, "What was that?"
"See to Caius. I'll take these whoresons." Plautus had already dropped into a crouch and was moving forward. Enid lay motionless where she had fallen. I swung back towards the closed doors just as they were flung open and I slashed Excalibur sideways in a hissing sweep at the first man who came charging through. Its tip sliced through the front of his neck as though it had encountered nothing. His eyes and his mouth went wide in disbelief and his momentum kept him coming. I side-stepped onto my bad leg, following the direction of my swing, and whipped a backhanded slash at the second man in the doorway, who had not had time to recover from his surprise. Again, it was the tip, the last six inches of the blade, that caught him. He was still almost seven feet from me and had just drawn his gladium, so his arm was bent upwards in the slashing position. My blade took him on the wrist, severing his hand completely before clanging against his helmet. From behind me came a clash of blades as Plautus met the others, and I threw myself forward into the day-room, slamming my skystone dagger to the hilt beneath the handless man's still upraised arm in passing, and jerking it out again with the weight of my forward momentum.
The scene that confronted me stays stuck in my mind like a memory of a mosaic picture. Seneca still stood beside the crib, frozen in consternation, his eyes and mouth wide open in anger and surprise, his hands raised in front of him, fingers pointing towards me. Caius had launched himself across the floor in a stumbling run, either to attack Seneca or to try to save the child, I do not know which. The Catamite, as I thought of him, was leaping towards Caius on an intercepting course, a dagger in his right hand, his left reaching for Cay. As I absorbed this, the two men met and the weight of the younger man took Caius over backwards, off-balance and falling. The Catamite, however, had more strength than I would have thought. His left elbow hooked around Cay's neck and held him up until they crashed together against the wall. Before I could react the Catamite had Caius pinned firmly in front of him, his back arched against the pressure of the stranglehold, the point of the dagger pressing into Caius's neck below the ear.
I hesitated and lost the initiative. I heard the slither of Seneca's sword come hissing from its sheath and his voice filled the room: "Kill the old man! This is the one we want!" And then Caius gave me back the initiative. He brought up his knees and let his whole weight jerk his captor forward, away from the wall. As the Catamite stumbled towards me off balance, I went for him, swinging my new sword high and bringing it down like an axe across his back. It caught him across the shoulders, slicing clean through the leather cuirass that he wore, but it lodged there, caught in the toughened armour for the space of two heartbeats.
I saw a flash of whiteness and jerked the blade free, whirling towards the movement. Seneca was snatching the baby from its crib, holding it by its bunched swaddling clothes, and Enid, beautiful, naked Enid, was throwing herself on him. Their bodies came together and my insides screamed as I saw the blade in his hand strike upwards. She convulsed, her whole body seeming to hunch around the point of impact, and then he pushed her away violently and stood there wild-eyed, like a demon straight from Hades, the blood-stained blade in one hand and the screaming child, soaked with its mother's blood, in the other. Enid fell heavily on her back, her arms across her bloodied belly, her legs scissoring convulsively. Nearby, almost unnoticed by me, the Catamite began to crawl away from the huddled shape that was Caius.
"Stand away!" Seneca's eyes were glaring with that same sickening, empty intensity I remembered. "Back! Stand back or the brat dies now."
"If the baby dies now, you will take months to die, Seneca, I swear to you on his mother's blood."
"Then save him! Save the little bastard!" He hoisted the child high in the air above his head so that it dangled, red-faced and screaming. His other hand, raised high beside it, pressed the bloody blade to the child's gut.
"Save him, Varrus, you son of a raddled whore! Throw that thing down. That sword. Now. Over here, by me. Throw it!" He was screaming at the top of his voice and I was terrified that he would kill the child in spite of everything.
I had no choice. I looked at Enid's body, now grown still and odd-looking in the strangeness of death. I looked at Caius and saw blood bubbling slowly from his neck, around the hilt of the Catamite's blade. The Catamite himself was about two paces behind me, crawling painfully, scrabbling at the marble-tiled floor. I thought of all the blood and all the carnage and the misery and pain that had spilled down from that one day so many years ago, and my anger and grief overwhelmed me. My dear friend Phoebe had died for that, and now Enid, and Caius. All the innocents. I turned my back on Seneca and raised my new sword high. The skystone dagger fell at my feet as I grasped the cross-hilt in both hands and drove the point downward, like a spear, between the Catamite's shoulders and into his evil heart.
"Varrus!" The voice was an insane scream. "I gave you an order! Didn't you hear me? I gave you an order!"
I turned my head slowly, incredulous, to look at him, and at the sight of him I closed my eyes.
"That thing! That sword! I want it over here. Now!"
I gripped the hilt firmly and began to work it slowly back and forth, loosening it until I could pull it from the corpse, and then I flung it to him, beyond caring any more. The baby had to live. If I gave in to him, surely not even as demented a thing as he could kill a baby... ? The sword clanged loudly on the marble floor and slid to his feet. Still holding the infant high, he stretched with one foot and kicked it away from him, behind him.